Nicole Furlonge and her daughter Logan, 5, of Lawrenceville, New Jersey chat with friends at the Mad Hatter's Tea & Bubbly benefit for the Lund Family Center. / ALISON REDLICH, Free Press

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SOUTH BURLINGTON — A propeller-hatted Tweedledum and Tweedledee, shiny aqua-skinned Caterpillar, White Rabbit and multiple incarnations of the Mad Hatter himself gathered at the Lund Family Center’s Mad Hatter’s Tea held on a recent Sunday afternoon.

Although not all were in full “Alice in Wonderland” costume, many of the 200 guests came in exotic headwear, from broad floppy-brimmed straw hats to homemade creations.

“I made this hat out of tissue paper and hot glue and some feathers,” said 9-year-old Lily Brandolino of Williston, who ultimately won a prize for best children’s hat. “And I didn’t even know it was a Mad Hatter party!”

A volunteer team had joined Lund employees working hard all morning to decorate the South Burlington home and lawn of hosts Maurene and Bill Gilbert with festive tissue flowers, balloons and Cheshire cat grins, which popped up in unexpected places just as they do in the classic children’s story.

Spirited games of croquet and musical toad stools as well as an obstacle course and treasure hunt took place across the expansive party grounds. Hatless guests made their own party hats at the brown bag hat-making activity station and cheerful painted designs bloomed on many small faces.

Happily, the grouchy Queen of Hearts with her constant refrain of “Off with their heads!” was nowhere to be found.

Creative fundraiser

Colorful hat centerpieces graced outdoor tables, while the dining room table inside held an elegant silver tea service and a charming assortment of china tea cups flanked by platters of miniature scones and refined finger sandwiches.The china, explained Maurene Gilbert, had belonged to her mother and grandmother, and the silver was from her husband’s family. “It’s really fun to use all this stuff,” she said, surveying the spread. “The silver hadn’t been polished in 35 years!”

Crazy hats and fancy tablewares aside, the tea party supported the serious work of Burlington’s Lund Family Center, founded in 1890 as the “Home for Friendless Women” by members of the Vermont Women’s Christian Temperance Union.Vermont’s largest and oldest statewide adoption agency has evolved over its 120 years, explained Barbara Rachelson, the center’s executive director, to become “a resource for families, especially women, teens and older, who are pregnant or parenting and need assistance of some kind.”

Lund offers drug, alcohol and trauma counseling as well as parenting and education support with residential options. The adoption program now places older children as well as infants, Rachelson continued, and adoptive families can be single parents or same-sex couples.

“Things have changed a lot since pregnant unmarried women had to wear wedding rings and hide in the bushes,” Rachelson noted. “Back then there was some education, but mostly they taught them how to sew. ... We do a lot to help women get off welfare. Our goal is really to break cycles of addiction, poverty and abuse.”“I’ve always believed in the program,” Maurene Gilbert said. “If you want to keep your child and have a life, education is crucial.”

Beverly Wool, chairwoman of the event, didn’t think twice, she said, when asked to help out. “Anything to do with helping young women and families,” she said, “and it’s a great way to connect with other people who believe the same thing.”The food theme for the event, Wool explained, was “deceptively delicious” or perhaps, “curiouser and curiouser,” as Alice would say.

A box full of chocolate mice from Mirabelles was not causing anyone to run screaming from the kitchen and a sheet cake from caterer Rachel Jacobs appeared to be a casserole dish of lasagna covered with frosting “cheese sauce.”Birchgrove Baking of Montpelier had created freshly baked “Devil Dogs,” “Twinkies,” “Hostess cupcakes,” “Sno Balls” and “Nutter Butters” — close ringers in appearance to their mass-produced models, but light years apart in taste and texture.

Eyes as big as saucers in her butterfly-painted face, tea party guest Logan Furlonge, 5, of Lawrenceville, N.J., tried to pick from among the mouthwatering treats as her dad, Nigel, looked on.

Personal connections

Nigel Furlonge explained that the family had traveled to Vermont for the event because his wife, Nicole, had been a Lund baby given up by her birth mother in 1972.

With her daughter eating next to her and her 2-year-old son napping in a stroller nearby, Nicole Furlonge explained that she was adopted by a family in Boston when she was 2 months old. “Growing up, I didn’t come back,” she said. In fact, Furlonge continued, she didn’t get in touch with Lund until college when she contacted the organization for non-identifying medical and background information on her birth mother.

That was the extent of it, Furlonge said, until a year or so ago when she called Lund to find out more about their current work and learned that the agency had discovered several boxes of archival materials and was looking for help to evaluate and catalog them.

Both the Furlonges are secondary school teachers, and Nicole Furlonge has a Ph.D. and strong research background. She came back in September of 2009 to check out the historical documents. “They toured me around, too,” she added. “It was also a kind of homecoming.”

It is gratifying, Furlonge said, to be able to return and help Lund. “This is a way for me to use my skills as a writer and researcher to help the organization tell its story,” she explained. “The history is rich and complex; the organization has grown as the community needed it to change.”

While she has explained to her own children that she is adopted, Furlonge believes they are too young to fully understand what that means. “This visit I’ve come to bring my family with me, to show them where I was born,” she said.

For Logan, sitting on her mother’s lap and holding a butterfly lollipop that matched her painted face, the party based on one of her favorite books was what it was all about.

“My last birthday party was Alice in Wonderland,” she said. “I’ve read it a lot of times.”